4 Rookie WordPress Mistakes!

Ben Crocker June 28th, 2018

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system, and for a good reason. With an intuitive design, scalability for small and medium businesses and a very low price point, more people than ever are choosing to build their new websites on WordPress.

Newpath web can assist not only with building new WordPress websites but also with WordPress plugin development tasks, including creating new plugins, updating or adjusting existing ones to suit your needs. But, we’ve seen a lot of bad examples of WordPress websites, including ones that are highly insecure, significantly overgrown or underutilised.

Below, we’ve summarised four mistakes that we see on a regular basis that really make our skin crawl! Let’s try to avoid these moving forward!

Admin Logins

We all know that you can create users on WordPress. From the CEO to the receptionist, everyone in your organisation should have access to the website, just in case they need to make changes. What we encounter on a regular basis is the persistent use of an Admin account; the one that comes with the initial set-up.

This is a horrible idea for two reasons: one, you are unable to track who makes which changes to the site, and two, you open yourself up to significantly more security risks. Admin users are almost always targeted by hackers, allowing them to guess the username and then push through with cracking your password.

By changing the admin name to something else, and by assigning user profiles to individuals, you can avoid many website issues moving forward.

Plugin Overcapitalisation

Delivering quality WordPress plugin development, we know how poorly these websites can utilise plugins. Developers are known to installed hundreds of plugins to suit small, minor processes that need to be considered in the long run of your website’s lifespan.

Plugins are third-party software programs, meaning that all are potential entrance points for nefarious individuals. Additionally, they can develop bugs, they can negatively interact with each other and can significantly disable the performance of your website.

Constant review and cleansing of your plugin situation is an ideal solution to this issue and will result in a far better website.

Review Performance

Expanding on that previous idea, many WordPress websites can fall under the weight of poor performance. Whether it is hundreds of plugins slowing everything down, unoptimized images weighing in thousands of megabytes, or any number of other coding issues, a slow website is a poor website.

Users are likely to stay on a loading page for less than three seconds, so if your website takes too long to load, you risk having them leave without engaging with any content. Constantly reviewing speed can ensure that you stay ahead of the competition and remain engaging for your entire userbase.

No Staging

Working on a live site can be a messy disaster if not done correctly. Including new pages, new content or new plugins all have the potential to break a website, rendering it useless for customers coming in on a regular basis.

The use of staging websites is one possible solution to resolve this. Any changes can be rigorously tested on a staging server and reviewed from a quality assurance and user experience perspective before being pushed live.

Find Good WordPress Development

WordPress is a fantastic solution for people looking to build their own website. However, it can turn sour very quickly if not managed correctly. Trust us; in many instances of WordPress plugin development, we’ve had to completely redo the entire website because of how poor everything had been set up.

Working with a competent developer is crucial; someone who can create a perfectly optimised, manageable website that offers everything your customers need. Talk to our WordPress developers today to find out more.